The initial access procedure for providing initial access 100 for a user equipment (UE) 120 to an access point (AP) 110, e.g. a radio cell or a base station, an example of which is illustrated in FIG. 1, includes the following steps: broadcast signalling, cell detection, beam alignment and random access. Before the beams 111, 121 of the AP 110 and the UE 120, respectively, are aligned, beam scanning has to be done, which can consume a considerable amount of radio resources (time, frequency). For example, when a hybrid beamforming transceiver architecture is applied, both TX and RX need to switch beams via analog circuits (e.g. the configuration of analog phase shifters). Such analog beam switching can be quite slow, e.g. requires 500 nano seconds (ns) to 1 micro seconds (us) (depending on implementation). This means that guard intervals (GI) of 500-1 us have to be reserved between the transmission of different beams 121, 122. During such GI, no signal is transmitted and received. As a result, the system will have signaling overhead and high latency of user access, i.e. long user waiting time.